Athletic Performance Podcast
The Athletic Performance Podcast: we discuss all things performance-related, with a focus on pushing the boundaries of speed, power, and strength.
Athletic Performance Podcast
013 - Spencer Medick on Developing Baseball Talent
Spencer Medick is a part of the New York Yankees Player Development Staff. He has a background as a D1 baseball athlete as well as some tenure in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization.
Here's a quick overview of our show:
✅ Measuring what matters in a chaotic world of data analytics
✅ Evaluating player performance and recovery with training tools
✅ Technology utilization in the development of MLB Prospects
✅ Determining physical preparation needs for elite athletes
✅ ..and much, much more
Please follow us on instagram @athleticperformancepod for more content and solutions to this podcast.
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Hey, welcome back to another episode of the athletic performance podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Patrick, and today on the line, I have Spencer Medick. We're taking a little bit of a departure today from interviewing other strength and conditioning coaches and talking to a minor league pitching coach. Spencer is a guy I've had the pleasure of coaching myself, but he's got a tremendous knowledge base. Not only has he gone through the entire ranks of the baseball world from Juco to D1 to eventually being part of the Diamondbacks organization and even playing some independent ball, he's now coaching for the Yankees at the minor league level. We talk about a number of things that I think are absolutely critical that I want to riff on just a little bit here before we get into the conversation. First one is he talks about measuring what matters. In the world of data collection today, it's easy to get caught down the rabbit hole, chasing certain numbers, trying to figure out what all this data means. But ultimately, you need to know that your athletes can be performers. We sift through some of that information, and he does talk about what's important for the athletes that they're looking at. Next, we talk about how physical preparation sets the floor. It tells you what kind of capacity that an athlete actually has available to them, and they think of skill as how much of that engine that you can actually utilize. I often think of two quadrants, at least lately I have been. The quadrants are an intersection of athleticism and skill. And I see a number of athletes who have very high skill but very low athleticism. For them, physical preparation, strength and conditioning, improving your speed is obviously going to be something that helps you get to the next level. It doesn't matter how high your skill is, if you just don't have the physics to match a particular level, you're going to get dominated by the competition. And on the flip side, you have some athletes who are very elite. They're very explosive, very fast, they've got some natural gifts from the gods, but they just haven't put in the work to develop the skill that they need To be an excellent performer, we talk about the balance of these two things and how the development of young athletes is so, so important. We also talk about some load management challenges with young athletes. They have congested, congested calendars. They have rain outs where all of a sudden you've got to play 5 games in 3 days. We talk about the importance of sleep as one of the biggest differentiators to help athletes recover and actually manage the stress that they're under. And we also dive a little bit into some technology, how he's using force plates, motion capture, and even the Proteus motion to identify deficits for athletes and monitor fatigue. Overall, I try to steer Spencer toward, talking to a lot of the young athletes that I have the pleasure of coaching. But I think if you're a coach of other athletes, there's a lot of value in this conversation in terms of how sport coaches are looking at and evaluating athletes and what we can do from the strength and conditioning standpoint to improve our athletes performance. I think this is a great episode that you're going to enjoy. And I hope that you can give this and the rest of the podcast a five star review so we can get out to more people. Thanks for listening.
Ryan Patrick:Spence man, welcome to the show. I'm super excited about this 1. I think you're the 1st. Like, skill development coach that I've really had on here, so I know you're going to have a ton of insight to offer and there's obviously. A ton of crossover in terms of what we do in, like, physical prep strength conditioning with ultimately what you're trying to get the athletes to do. But I think 1st, I just want you to start and just tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Kind of bring us up to speed on your role, your position and really what you're You're doing for your career right now.
Spencer Medick:Yeah, this is this is my first podcast. So I appreciate you having me on. So yeah, it was basically born into baseball being left handed played from a pretty early age, but I played a whole multitude of sports including a bunch of other spring sports that conflicted with baseball, lacrosse, tennis, golf, you name it. If you if you name a sport, I probably played at some point in my life. But started specializing in my later years in high school, got into baseball had an arm injury in towards the end of my high school career, like junior or senior year, had to get Tommy john. So basically I, I was the transfer portal in college before the transfer portal was a thing. I went to a small D three school my freshman year just to try to continue playing had a really good summer ball year transfer to a junior college, ended up at Elon university to finish out my college career at a D one school wasn't drafted out of college played decided to go up to Cresce sports performance in Massachusetts at the time. Was there. About nine months straight training ended up getting signed by the Arizona Diamondbacks out of an independent ball workout and then played with them for about a year and then probably spent, I would say, four years total between affiliate and independent ball before I got into coaching in twenty eighteen finished up my career and then joined the Yankees in twenty, twenty two and this is, this is beginning of year three for me with them. Yeah, baseball has been a big part of my life kind of throughout had kind of had an interesting journey to get where I am. I didn't really think I would stay in baseball after after playing. But I've kind of found a passion for coaching. Definitely was the type of player that always tried to find answers myself and, you know, reach out to mentors and where I got connected with a lot of people like, like yourself. A lot of the guests you've had on as well. So, I've, I've enjoyed every second of being a coach.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, it's always the, you know, this is such a common theme in our industry. So there's always some setback as an athlete, either injuries. Or you know, for myself, for example, is just, I just didn't excel enough to make it to the highest level. So you're always trying to kind of super sleuth this, this problem. But tell me a little bit more about your role with the Yankees. Now, what are you, what kind of coaching are you doing for them? And how's this experience played into that?
Spencer Medick:Yep. So I'm a minor league pitching coach with them. Pitching was kind of always my first passion again, being lefty played a little bit of outfield, but I could not hit to save my life. So pitching is where I excelled. And that was that was kind of my journey. Got into my first job with coaching. I was actually hired by the Yankees now director of pitching. I guess it's official titles, senior president now with the Yankees, but the guy's a rockstar his name is Sam Breen. And so he initially got me into coaching. He had trained me when I was still playing and he had a job opening a couple of years back with the Yankees and felt like I was a good fit. And so I'm super grateful for, for him, but that's kind of how I ended up in this role. I've always been a pitching first guy very, very interested in training development, and then the skill of how to get the most out of your body. How, how do guys end up throwing, you know, 95 to a hundred we've seen the average velocity and, and they'll be increased from about 90, 91, 15 years ago to last year, it was a tick over 94. So it's been a tremendous amount of improvement just in a pretty short amount of time.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. And I think with that velocity obviously comes a lot of injuries and a lot of young athletes trying to chase VLO because I think on every level, it's like, well, the physics of what you're doing have to match the next here in order for you to get there. But we haven't, we work with a ton of young pitchers. I feel like there is a great disconnect sometimes between the strength and conditioning field, the get stronger at all costs, the barbell coach, a lot of, a lot of us coaches have inherited this pedigree that. Maybe it's inconsistent with what an athlete really needs to perform at the highest levels when we're talking about pitching, no matter what way you slice it, even power training with a barbell just doesn't compare to the velocities that these athletes shoulders are exposed to. And so what I'd like you to do is maybe touch on what do, what do these young athletes, and I'm talking primarily high school age need to know or understand about balancing this physical preparation to tolerate higher velocities, enhanced performance, also with the skill development, because I often feel like they can go one of two ways. We see some kids who maybe in seventh grade have a really high velocity and kind of double down on this. But then within two years, they're physically, Underwhelming or they plateau or you see these kids who spend too much time in the gym and now they, you know, have massive drop offs in shoulder rotation and injuries and, and things that plague them. So how would, how do you reconcile these two camps and kind of marry'em for your athletes?
Spencer Medick:For sure. I think big rocks you know, the physical preparation side that really just sets the floor for what you're capable of on the field, right? The bigger engine you have, the more horsepower you have, you know, you're just bigger, faster, stronger, more powerful than your competition. The skill side is how much you're getting out of that engine. Are you able to. You know, do the demands of your sport not only acutely in game, but also chronically over the demands of your sporting season. Not to get sidetracked here, but I think a lot of times like younger, especially high school kids playing travel ball there, their demands of like a weekend tournament might be more than what professional athletes experience. I can remember times of, you know, taking 45 hour road trips to high school tournament. summer ball and playing 67 games in a weekend. And most of those kids are playing 67 games. We just had this past week we were down in Georgia and our first three games of the series all got rained out. So we ended up playing five games in three days. Now, we also manage the lineup. We played 27 ending double headers. But we managed the lineup to try to give guys day off and not acutely spike their workload and drain them. But I don't know if a lot of, you know, travel tournament coaches are seeing it that way. Same with parents and players to like, right, the players want to play. They're not thinking about Hey, what? What's my workload look like? You know, how many games am I averaging per week? How many innings am I getting? It's like, I want to go play. There's college coaches here. I want to go. I want to go get seen. And so that can that can certainly be detrimental. But again, going back to original question. I think marrying the two a big piece is just measuring it, right? Measuring what matters, knowing your strengths and then also knowing your deficiencies, right? If you're one of those. Yeah. Gym rats that is getting bigger, faster, stronger all the time. You spend, you know, two years of your life dedicating yourself to the gym and you're not seeing much translation to sport. It's like, okay, where's that missing bucket? Right. Are you, are you losing some, some flexibility, some movement capacity? How do you, how do you train both? Right. It's, you can probably dial back how, how much you get after it or how frequently you get after it in the gym. You still can, especially if that's, you know, what you love. Right. But at the same time, it's like, all right, let's let's gravitate more towards the missing bucket, whether that's you know, doing things that's going to restore some some shoulder movement. Or just more, more skilled training in that regard.
Ryan Patrick:Yes. When these guys come into you say spring ball, are they physically prepared to go? I mean, what's the culture of baseball at that level? Are these, how are these guys training compared to maybe the high school athletes who are kind of aiming to get there? their first shot or even make it into some kind of pipeline for professional baseball.
Spencer Medick:Yeah spring training. Most of our guys are ready to go. You know, we're very communicative about where they need to be day one when they report to spring training. And we do a pretty good job with the Yankees of you know, having a program for them, making sure that they are built up to where they need to be. Kind of having some safeguards when they come in of, you know, assessing them, checking them out, making sure that they check all these boxes before it's like, okay, green light, you go right. We try to track as much as we can communicate them with them during the off season. Pretty periodically getting updates from them when we can. That's probably the big one to make sure that, you know, guys are. But they're driven, right? They're all professional athletes. This is their job. They're getting paid to do it. They're all chasing the ultimate goal of becoming a big leaguer. So it is, it is kind of a year round thing for them. You know, if, if that's what you're truly passionate about as a high schooler, sure, you can start dedicating yourself to that way, but a lot of these guys, they're 22, 23, a little bit more mature. They've this, this is what they've dedicated their life to, right? Whereas, you know, thinking back to when I was 17, 18. You know, I wanted to play in the MLB. That was a goal of mine. But at the same time, like I also had a bunch of different interests, hobbies, played a bunch of different sports. You know, you don't truly know what you want. Not saying don't go for it, but don't pigeonhole yourself thinking if. Your only route to be a big leaguer is to do this. You see time and time again, guys who are multi sport athletes, even in college, I think one of the top arms in the draft this year coming out of Iowa he played football and baseball in college. And only recently, once he basically figured out he was probably going to be a first rounder in the draft, it was like, all right, I think it's time to start dedicating myself to just baseball. There's, there's plenty of late developers plenty of opportunities for you to get to the big leagues. Average, average age in the big leagues this year is I think 29. So man, even if you start dedicating yourself at 22, you still got seven, seven years until you're even average age in the big leagues. So there's a lot more time than people think to kind of train, get after it and, and start dedicating yourself. If that's, if that's something you want to go down.
Ryan Patrick:That's so wild because a 29 year old in the NBA is like, There's hesitation on, do we give this guy another big contract? Because, you know, like baseball, they're playing year round. There's a ton of impact. There's just so much stress that your body can endure. Yet, I guess because the nature of baseball is more skill related than it is pure output that these guys are maturing much later than other professional sports. Is that, I mean, is that your experience? Or I don't know about this.
Spencer Medick:Part of it. Baseball is a difficult sport, right? And, and the ones who have the skill to do it at a high level are, are rewarded handsomely. And then they also do it for, for a very long time. You know, it's it's, it's probably similar to the NFL and NBA where, you know, the average career length is only, you know, two, two and a half years, something like that. But it, it takes so much skill development to, to reach the big leagues and you know, the, the Juan Sotos of the world who are just these incredibly skilled athletes who can do it. They get rewarded very handsomely for it. And then also they you know, they can do it for a very, very long time. And you see these guys who end up playing for 15, 20 years who are just like the absolute masters of skill. That's probably a big reason why. And again, same thing in the NBA, right? You may debut at 2021 and you're playing at the very highest level. A lot of big leaguers may not debut until 24, 25, 26 season. So, the wear and tear, maybe, maybe it's a little bit more skewed towards the younger years for a lot of these guys, but yeah, I'm not, I'm not 100 percent sure why, but just kind of riffing. That's, that's where I kind of go with.
Ryan Patrick:No, that's good. And I actually want to pick up on that last thing you said about the wear and tear at the younger years, because earlier we talked about, you know, the, the congested competition calendar where these kids are doing what, you know, it's pretty crazy. Strength and conditioning professionals, or even the rehab specialists, but just consider inappropriate load volume spikes. It's just too much and too short of a period of time. And, you know, these kids show up on Tuesday and I'm like, ah, my elbow hurts. Well, of course it does son. You just pitched like, you know, 30 innings in a, in a weekend. What I guess my goal with this is I really want to send a message, especially to some of the younger athletes that I work with about how to ensure Longevity for them on one hand, they can't really control the competitive calendar. It's a cultural issue that we're, we're constantly battling against. And I feel like it's really up to their coach in their organization about how much tournament time they're scheduling. On the other hand, I know they're doing skill stuff outside of what we do with them. And I also want to add another piece, like you mentioned that these, these These kids are, they're teenagers. They're trying to figure out the social landscape of high school. They still have maybe clubs they want to be a part of or other competing commitments that cut into their time. So there's so many balls in the air that they have to juggle. But if we're thinking big rocks in terms of, you know, maybe guidelines in terms of how they should be taking care of themselves. What kind of things they should be focusing on, if their KPIs that are worth measuring, what would your advice or recommendation be to some of these young athletes to just ensure that they are setting themselves up for long term success, maybe not finding themselves injured too early,
Spencer Medick:right? Yeah, I myself was a casualty of going to a baseball showcase in the middle of football season. Hadn't really been throwing showcase landed on a weekend where we had, we had a bye week and I was like, Oh, perfect timing. I'll go throw through two innings. And next day I couldn't straighten my arm. So, it's 1 of those things where, you know, looking back, you wish you had more information of what, you know, now, and you know, maybe it wasn't the best decision at the time. If there's anything that they can absolutely control, man, sleep, sleep would be the big one I would hammer out. How, how important that is for not only recovery, but also operating at peak performance. You know, teenagers need a ton of sleep. You know, they say eight hours. Teenagers might be more like 9 to 10 hours. This is why you have those sleepy teenagers staying up late at night, sleeping until 10 11 in the morning. you know, get your sleep. But man, if you can sleep in as old college coach used to say, sleeping on the front end, get to bed earlier because you got to get up for school. Trying to hammer out sleep. That's probably the biggest thing you can do for on field performance and then just staying healthy. That's when your body repairs could go on and on. But That's, that's easily the biggest one that's in their control. Cause they, again, there's a lot of things outside their control, their travel team schedule, their, you know, how often their coach wants to play them sometimes when you're the better player on the field, you're the one who's always pitching your, and then you're going into play shortstop after, or, you know, Just for lack of a better term, getting abused a little bit cause you're good and, and when you're good, you're like, yeah, give me the ball. I, I want to go do it. Not necessarily thinking about long term you know, there's some, there's some new tools out there. The, the pull sleeve ways to track workload at least on the throwing end we use GPS monitors here with the Yankees to kind of track workload as well a lot of pro sports teams, NFL teams, NBA Use them as well to kind of manage, manage player workload, both in game and in practice. But obviously most teenagers don't have, don't have access to that. So it's, it's being smart, making sure you give yourself probably four to six weeks of like throwing on ramp. We kind of operate off that Charlie Francis high, low model as well. Where we're trying to consolidate stress in certain days, give days dedicated to recovery. Especially with those really driven athletes, you see them time and time again, trying to like, Maximize their training every day and their recovery days. They're trying to like, all right, what can I get better on today? Get better at recovering. Just, just play catch. You can have a focus of like, Hey, I'm going to hit my partner in the chest every time. I'm going to take my 25 throws. I'm going to call it a day and I'm going to go do something I enjoy. So, That's basically where I think things that athletes can control would be one prior to prioritizing their sleep. They're going to, they're going to feel better during the day. They're going to perform better. They're going to be more alert in the classroom. They're not going to feel like they're dragging. And then, and then a couple of things you can do to control it is just like. separate and know what your plan is for each day. Or let's say it's game day. It's training day. We can get after it or it's a light day. I can, I can give myself some grace and kind of pull back a little bit knowing that the main goal today is to actually recover. And that's how I get better today.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, I see a number of athletes, you know, we'll send a DM or they'll comment an emoji to a story we post if it's got some other friends in and it comes in at like 1 a. m. and it's like, I know you have, you're coming in at 630 tomorrow to train with me. Like, this is, you know, it always opens that conversation. I'm like, Hey, man, like, you got to get to bed, like, put the Xbox controller down, get off social media. It's bedtime. Like I know you're, I know you're a teenager and you're, you're a big boy, but like you got to get sleep. And I always try to communicate with my athletes to get to the next level. It's not this there's a cultural plague of a work harder, grind, David Goggins, and people buy into that. And I get it. I love it. It's. Again, I think it goes back to some of the strength and conditioning culture. It's very football gridiron, tough, like work until, you know, they're not tired type of stuff, but that doesn't really beget the recovery process. And sometimes that's perceived as wussy. I know for me, anything that's not lifting or training. Soft tissue work is like kind of boring and it's on an as needed basis. So it's always trying to balance this. I know I'm going on a few tangents here, but I think what I try to emphasize to, to my athletes is making it to the next level is not this bite your teeth, total, you know, in kill switch engaged type of approach, it's really just doing a few things. With great consistency and a lot of these things are easy to do. It's easy to go to bed on time. It's easy to, you're already watching Netflix to grab a lacrosse ball or a foam roller and be intentional about some soft tissue work, but it's also easy not to do. And I think that's a trap for a lot of kids. And again, it goes back to like, I don't, I don't need this to be the most intense, like serious as a heart attack process. But you're going to have to be very intentional about doing a few things at a higher level. Then your peers to make it to the level that you want to be at.
Spencer Medick:Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a time and place to go, you know, full Goggins and who's going to carry the boats. But man, doing that 24 hours a day as an athlete. You know, when, when do you turn, when do you turn it off? And thinking back to like, as you were going on towards the end of just like back to James clear stuff of like habit, habit stacking, right. It's very easy to just grab a foam roller while you're watching Netflix and, you know, binging, whatever you want to watch. And it's also very easy not to. So if it's like, you don't have to turn your life upside down and become this dedicated. All right. I'm always hydrating. I'm always. you know, thinking about bedtime. I'm thinking about foam rolling and getting soft tissue work. And it could be just like, Hey, every time I flip on Netflix, I'm going to grab my lacrosse ball and just pairing those two together. Or you know, every time Netflix asked me, am I still watching? I'm going to grab my foam roller. I'm going to like. Lay on it for five minutes. I'm going to hit any sore spots, whatever it may be. Right. You find your own habit, you stack it. But doing little things, it'll become easier and easier over time because you've kind of built in those habits. So just trying to pair those up. I would say it's not like, Hey, no more Netflix. You have to be very dedicated. It's like, you're a kid, man. Have fun, do the things you want, but it's like, Hey, anytime I'm going to scroll on Instagram, it's, I'm going to scroll on Instagram while I'm laying on a roller. Or whatever it may be, or you know. Hey, I can scroll on Instagram, but I can't be in bed while I'm doing it. Just kind of try to prioritize not only getting to sleep, but, but good quality sleep too. I've been messing around with some binaural beats stuff before bed. Trying to put myself in like a good zone and get more out of my sleep. Cause I'm a, I'm an early morning person and I do not do well with night games. My circadian rhythm gets all jacked up. So I'm trying to set some hard deadlines every night about when I get to bed. You know, what's my pre bed routine? How do I get to sleep faster? How do I fall asleep? This is slowly turning into a sleep podcast rather than a, Skill and performance podcast. But those are, those are certainly some, some tactics you can take as a young athlete to just, you know, I think it's like an old Kobe Bryant quote about, you know, all right, if I practice two hours a day, I'm going to get just as good as everyone else who's also practicing two hours a day. If I can, you know, wake up early and get one more hour of practice in, or one more thing. That doesn't mean you need to get up early and practice for an hour. Just means, Hey, if you do one more little extra thing, On top of what everyone else is doing, the team practice, right? Over time, you're going to get infinitely better than them because you are doing those little habits that are going to add up over a long time.
Ryan Patrick:Right? I always try to give my athletes a representation of this, exactly what you're saying here. Like, hey, if you, you, you know, you're training at three o'clock. If you show up 10 minutes early and you're very intentional about doing some soft tissue work, or we go back to the Netflix thing, they probably watch it every day. Right. The kids tell me they're busy. They don't know busy till they have an adult life. But they have time to watch their shows. If you just spent 10 minutes each day, just 10, it's not a lot, doing some soft tissue work in a month, that's 300 minutes. That's roughly five hours. Of intentional work, doing something that is going to help you in the long term. That's a massive swing from a very little nugget of what they can actually do. Now, with that in mind, I do want to make sure that we don't dive too much into the sleep podcast. So I want to talk performance. Now you mentioned earlier, we talked about this GPS, where these athletes are going and measuring what matters. So when. Athletes come into you. What is your assessment process look like? What are the KPIs that you guys are kind of considering, you know, understanding you guys have access to some technology that maybe are younger athletes don't. But I'd love to just hear kind of the bandwidth of what you're doing and looking at
Spencer Medick:for sure. I mean, so we, we typically, we draft or sign a player, acquire them. It's for a good reason, right? They're already pretty good. So we don't immediately bring them in and say like, Hey, let's change a bunch of stuff. We try to start with results at the plate. If you think about, you know, your favorite big league team, you got a whole swath of different players, different sizes, pitch shapes, everything. They all look completely different, but they're all successful in some nature to become, you know, the 1 percent of the 1 percent to play in the big leagues. So we try to essentially just identify from a skill level. You know, we have a motion capture lab. We have, you know, pitch tracking data, high speed cameras, all these things to identify, okay, what do they do really, really, really well. Like what made them good enough for us to want to acquire them first. Right. And then we look for, okay, where are some areas of improvement where maybe some areas that are currently keeping them from being in the big leagues right now. And then on the. physical preparation side. We also have force plates. We have proteus. We have you know, movement assessments. Our medical team will kind of evaluate everything and they'll do the same process, right? They'll say, all right, where is this guy, a superstar? And then where are some areas of improvement where we can maybe build a bigger engine? Maybe we can fill that missing bucket. Maybe they're just like a super strong athlete. We drafted a college kid who, you know, wasn't. Was an absolute grinder for four years in college and a monster in the weight room, and he was just bigger and stronger than everyone else in college. But now that the playing field's a little more level, hey, maybe we really need to shift more towards power. That's where, okay, maybe there, maybe their focus becomes more on acceleration. We know that their strength profile is good enough. It's about acceleration. How quickly can you produce that force? You know, now that average velocity from college has maybe 90 to all right now you're saying 94 95 on a regular basis. Do you have the a skill To make those decisions and put a bat up to a barrel or put a ball to a barrel, or like, are you just lacking the actual skill to you can make the decision, but you're not quick enough. You're just strong enough to muscle everything out. But now you actually have to train some quickness and some more explosiveness. So that's kind of how we look at everything. And then it kind of always starts with, like, what is the path to you getting to the big leagues and then working back from there? We typically try to start with results first, right? Because at the end of the day, you see all these funky guys like Darren O'Day, perfect example. I grew up in Baltimore, was a big Orioles fan, had a low slot, didn't throw very hard, funky delivery, but was like one of the greatest relievers in the game for a, for a stretch. Just because he was unique. He did things differently. And if somebody saw him throw that, it's like, ah, that guy's like, he was a walk on at Florida. Everyone undervalued him for, for so long. And then he, he becomes for a five to seven year stretch, probably one of the most dominant relievers in the game. So it's, everyone kind of has their own, their own path, their own profile. We just look for, you know, Leaning into the strengths and then also try to fill those missing buckets and really maximize their performance. We don't want to change who they are as an individual.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. To me, it sounds like you've got this dashboard. Things that you guys can't collect and you're just kind of tweaking these little volume dials, like just a little bit here, a little bit there. Nothing's an overhaul. It's more of this process of fine tuning. Is that fair to say
Spencer Medick:100%?
Ryan Patrick:And I think it even goes back to what you mentioned before is like, you've got to have some of the physical prerequisites. You've got to have the engine. Otherwise, you're You know, I always say, you don't, you don't put a, you know, a muffler on a smart car or a turbo. It's like, you, you've got to get that bigger engine first. Baseball. One of the things I love about baseball is, is the data acquisition. I feel like as an organization, they really led the way. Obviously movies like Moneyball and stuff really highlighted this. So maybe it was just the first that felt known to me, but the trickle down of this data sometimes gets lost in translation. So for a young athlete, do you, do you have any insight on what stuff is useful for them? And what's noise? What are the, what is there a metric that they're trying to chase, especially pitchers, that is maybe not the most relevant thing they need to be focusing on?
Spencer Medick:Mhm. I mean, tying it back to performance outs. Can you get outs right? Specifically, can you make hitters? If you're a pitcher, can you make hitters look bad in the box? Can you get strikeouts? Are you limiting walks and, you know, are you limiting hard contact against you? Those are kind of the big three. Start with results, right? And then some of the data that can come in of like, okay let's say on the physical side, it's I don't throw hard enough to, to get guys to swing and miss guys seem like they have all day. They're pulling everything off of me. They're all out in front. Okay. I probably just need to throw hard. It's like, what are, what's the avenue for me to throw harder? Is it I, you know, my, my forces is low. If you're looking at force plates or is it, Hey, my force is pretty good, especially relative in my body weight. Is my power low or hey, am I just 165 pounds, my relative force and relative power, all really good. I just don't have a frame yet. So trying to simplify and really focus on just one key metric. If it is that, that kid who just hasn't filled out a frame yet, maybe our metric is body weight. It doesn't have to be one of these fancy you know, jump momentum type of things. Metrics. It can be, Hey, how much are you weighing today? That's it. And that can be the main, main thing you focus on for a solid three to six months, and then you basically have this flywheel process of, okay, what is our objective? How do we move on to like, what does our action plan look like? Let's review it. What does that, how does that feed into everything? Did it work? Are we making progress back towards that main objective? If yes, we've accomplished objective time to set a new one. And then you just repeat that process over and over.
Ryan Patrick:The auditing piece of that is so valuable that it almost goes miss, but I love the simplicity of this because I see kids getting caught up, you know, in, oh, they're working on their spin rate. I'm like, bro, you throw 70 miles an hour. Like, what are you, what are you talking about? Your spin rate? Like. Yeah, grandpa can hit off you
Spencer Medick:for sure. Yeah, gravity gravity comes into play at some point no matter what the spin is. If if you're throwing 70
Ryan Patrick:speaking of body weight, is there Is there a target that you guys look for? I mean, you've talked about different frames, but I've seen some pitchers very tall, very lanky. They're kind of this bamboo rod of just whipping the ball. I've seen some of the shorter stockier pitchers who are definitely more muscly. What do you guys look for in terms of optimizing performance or is it just very individual?
Spencer Medick:Yeah, it's, it's pretty individualized to be honest. You know, everyone's put together a little bit differently. Maybe, you know, you look at a guy like DeGrom, who has freakishly good stuff but he's got a little deceptiveness in him as well. And it's just, he's long, he's lanky, and it's, you know, elbows and arms flying at ya. And you gotta be ready for a 99 or a 90 mile an hour slider. And you have other guys who are like Bartolo Cologne, who pitched for a very, very long time being, for lack of a better term, fairly overweight. And so you, you have these different body shapes, body sizes. We want to try to, in a perfect world, maximize what their, what their frame is capable of. Some people might, hey, my frame is probably built, best built to handle 6'4 205. Great. That's fine. Be like, let's be that. Let's get as close to that as we can. We don't need you to be that prototypical 64 to 25 guy. We're just trying to maximize who you are lean into your strengths and then maybe fill in those missing buckets. We don't have like a perfect model for you know, what an ideal picture looks like. Everybody's a little different and we want to try to fit, fit their needs. Yeah. And really lean into their strengths as best we can.
Ryan Patrick:Absolutely, man. I want to transition and talk a little bit about some of the technology, especially stuff that I think is more widely commercially available to the S and C practitioner. So I'd love to hear a little insight and on one force plates, how you guys are using them, what you're looking at, what's what trends have emerged with stuff you found valuable. And then the proteus as well. So let's, let's start with force plates with how are, how are they playing a role in your guys physical development and overall process?
Spencer Medick:Yeah, so we I guess without without giving any proprietary information away we definitely use them as part of part of scouting a little bit. Not necessarily like, okay, this guy's good or this guy's bad. It's, you know, hey, what is this guy currently capable of? And and maybe are there some areas of improvement or, you know, on, on our side, on the pitching side, we, we use it kind of to monitor fatigue as well over the course of a long season. Maybe it's, Hey, there's some underlying factors that may arise on force plates 1st and cause deeper questions to go into the guy and be like, Hey you know, we've noticed your MRSI is, has been decreasing a little bit. How's everything going? He's like, Oh, yeah, I've slept terribly this past week. You know, my broken my apartment or something and, you know, it's like. Yeah. Let's a fix that and be maybe this, this is a good time to, to not try to push you a little bit. Maybe we dial back in, in practice or reduce your pitch count slightly, those sorts of things try to give them a chance to recover, keep them healthy in the long run rather than push through it. So the, the force plates give us very good objective data on how guys are doing. And then also their, their in season training objectives to write is, is the programming we're prescribing for them accurately and effectively pushing their, their development in the path we want to go down. So we kind of use it on, on multiple fronts from the scouting side, from the fatigue side, and then also from the, like the just path through the big league side.
Ryan Patrick:That's awesome. That's very similar to what we use because I think one, it's a great diagnostic tool in terms of. I would say seeing what's beneath the hood, because some athletes can continue to jump at the same height. Yet their strategy changes immensely and you know this. So for people listening, there's changes in eccentric rate of force development. There's changes in the MRSI which are talking about in terms of how long they're actually pushing off the ground in order to achieve that same jump. And so it starts to Not a singular measurement, but I think a series of measurements start to kind of weave a story together in terms of what this athlete is expressing, how they're showing up, and you can see some pretty real effects of, you know, training when there's decrements, you can see the residual stress from long tournament weekends. And you can just see how training is evolving over time. I know just to give you a quick example, we had an athlete who They're a lot of their metrics went down for about a four week period and it was, you know, they were still training with us, but they had just started basketball high school athlete. So, of course, what do coaches do? They run the crap out of them. Legs were extremely tired. Just physical demands were, were high. And so we saw this dip. And we've got scale back training within four weeks, things normalized and made their cuts for the team. They're starting to work on more offense and things like that. So it's not about just getting these kids in shape, you know, just a massive difference, but we were able to catch that ahead of time. And it was just so, so valuable for us. just to take care of these athletes long term and not just continue to plow. Well, you're down, so we need more, more quad work. We need to squat more. And it would have been the complete incorrect thing to do at the time.
Spencer Medick:Absolutely. And it takes, it takes the subjective away and keeps it objective for guys, which keeps emotion out of it. You know, sometimes you're like, Oh, this kid looks like he's dragging. Maybe he just, He just doesn't want it. He doesn't want it bad enough. You know, parents are paying for training and he's not bought in. Maybe I don't think he loves the sport, but you know, you get them on the force plates and you've seen this downward trend and it's like, okay, maybe it's not that maybe he actually is fatigued and gassed and maybe we keep training light today those sorts of things, just always having good objective data to kind of keep your emotion and, and a little less subjectivity out of it. Just, it almost sometimes plays devil's advocate for you. Just to kind of keep your, your own personal bias out of it.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. I know you and I, we did some training on train hero through rebel. And the one thing I would always dismiss was the questionnaire at the beginning. How just sleep, what's your mood, what's your energy. I was like, yeah, swipe, swipe, swipe, like just push something. So you can't always trust, especially young athletes. And probably I've mentioned that the 22, 23 year olds. That you're working with to be completely honest and give you a, a, a really great longterm representation of how the recovery is, how their energy is. So, having, having some kind of output metric like that really helps cut through it and, and kind of see what's, what's going on with the athletes.
Spencer Medick:For sure, you kind of forget how fatigued you are after dry scooping some pre workout.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, I mean, that's, that's my MO too. So, it's a, I use the WHOOP for a long time. I think it's where, you know, having the data for myself gets me into a little trouble because, you know, I would wake up and it would tell me, oh, you're red for the day. And I think it goes 1 of 2 ways. People either look at it and say, oh, it's it's red. Like, I didn't sleep good. I should should not train very hard today. It's going to be a recovery day. Where again, it's like one singular point in time may or may not be necessary to back off training. But I tend to go the complete opposite where I'm like red, I'm green. I'm going to prove it. And so I like double down on training. It's like, if there's a problem, I just want to solve it with more force. So again, I think that the thing I want to illustrate or just kind of emphasize with this is being able to essentially keep a pulse on how athletes are. Evolving and responding to training and game related stress.
Spencer Medick:Yep. Yeah, it's, like you said, it's, it's tough to look at one singular data point and be like, okay, like, we need to make a decision based off of this one thing, like, always look for trends, right? It may just be, hey, they had a one down day. Maybe they, you know, just like, didn't activate quite as much that day because, you know. For whatever reason, they were just like, Hey, I'm ready to get after let's go. And so they, they get their jumps in and they're a little bit down and their training's totally fine. And, you know, a couple of days later, their, their jumps are great again. Now if you, we see like downward trends, maybe that spurs the conversation. But that's, that's probably our best way that we can try to try to monitor that is again, look for trends, even when we're using pitch tracking data. Like we don't necessarily look at, Hey, look at that one pitch. Maybe it's just a misread. Maybe there was a fan blowing or whatever it may be that miscalibrated our track man or something. It's like, hey, was the average from the session? What's been the average of your last few sessions? Are we making positive positive changes in that direction rather than looking at one individual pitch and be like, hey, what was different about that one pitch? Maybe it was a mystery. Maybe, maybe it was just slightly wrong slightly inflated, whatever it may be. Not trying to, you know, change everything we do off of one tiny little detail. But it's like, let's, let's move the average over time.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. So don't overreact in the short term, but when you got a series of data, don't underreact. In the long term,
Spencer Medick:absolutely. It was a great way of putting it.
Ryan Patrick:All right. I do want to talk about the new kid on the block with respect to technology. The Proteus we use it. We love it. We're still learning a lot about it and data starting to emerge. We talked to Sam, the owner of Proteus a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. And he was talking about how they're finding some correlates between, you know, pitching and exit velocity. Associated with improvements in the wattage that they're, they're seeing in the Proteus. How has this tool been for you guys? What kind of things have evolved in terms of are you using it for assessment? Is it purely a training tool? What role does it play in your guys process?
Spencer Medick:Yeah, so we're kind of in the same boat as you. We just got one last fall. At our minor league complex down in Tampa. So we've, it's very still pretty new to us in terms of, you know, what, how we're using it to really inform us of anything. Try to keep a very open mind. But sure, there's, there's, I mean, there's gotta be some sort of correlation with at least something baseball is a very rotational sport, whether you're throwing, you're swinging a bat. There's, there's certainly gotta be some, some benefit to just being able to rotate powerfully. The trunk is the largest segment of the human body. So it's like, how, how effectively can you utilize that to produce power? Probably only going to help. Just again, build that bigger engine for for speed. I love it in terms of like the, just the pneumatics of it. You have this full arc of resistance across. And then also just like getting data, getting a score, right. You know, we've hacked it in the past with using a radar gun when we were throwing med balls giving guys like an actual. Objective number to kind of shoot train for you. See it time and time again. You know, guys don't have like. necessarily know how hard they're pushing themselves until you stick a VBT on the bar or something like that. Like, okay, I was moving that at a 0. 7. Let me see if I can get a 0. 75 here. Like athletes are inherently competitive, especially just with themselves. So it's like, okay, if you can give them some sort of number to chase. It's like, boom, okay. Now I can, now I can train just a little bit harder. It's one of those things you can kind of win on the margins on. So me personally, that's kind of where I see a ton of value just in having Proteus, something like that, where it's like, we're training something that is so, so close to What ideally would translate onto the field but at the same time, it gives kind of like this objective numerical value to to your output and then you can track your progress over time with it. Right? So that's. That's where I see a ton of value in it. We haven't extracted too much from it yet, but having it now, at least we can start collecting data and then see if there's any carry over and correlation. But I have definitely, at least looking into it, have seen some things where it's like, okay, these, these certain three tests you know, are, are semi correlated with, you know, with on field performance, bat speed. Pitch velocity, whatever it may be.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah. I feel like we're in the same boat and I'll say this, I'll add to this. We found that athletes are not only competitive with themselves, but with each other. So when we do like a group, you know, a group of three to five guys on there, sometimes it can take them 20 to 30 minutes because they're just getting super hype. They're, they're, you know, doing Velo slaps before their final rep. And it's, it's a lot of fun, honestly, it's kind of crazy where I'm like, you guys need to like pick it up. Cause we got, you know, still an hour's worth of stuff to do, but because of that level of intensity that they're, they're able to bring to it, we're actually able to scale the volume back a little bit and manage it because their output's just so much higher than. They were to just kind of mindlessly throw a med ball a few times. Not that they do that, but just again, having that focus helps them tap into that extra two to 3 percent that really makes a difference in training.
Spencer Medick:A hundred percent, especially over the long run. Right. And, and it helps, you know, again, it's more information for the athlete to learn about themselves. It's, you know, when they walk in and they're like, Hey, something feels off today, I'm dragging a little bit. And then they get through their first couple of plyos and they see. The velocity down a tick where it's like, Hey, my effort is the same, but, but it's not quite there today. It's like, they start tying together. It's like, all right, I'm a little fatigued today. Maybe we don't push it quite as hard. Maybe we need to scale back. Maybe I need to have a conversation with my coach about, Hey, I'm definitely dragging today. What are some factors in my life? Maybe I did send her that message at 1 a. m. saying like, Hey, fire emoji. This looks sweet. And then I have a 6 30 a. m. session the next day. It's like, huh, maybe I should maybe should get to bed earlier. Maybe those sorts of things. So I think having having kind of those objective measures, especially throughout training can only provide more and more resources to the athlete to learn more about themselves, which is kind of really what we're after here.
Ryan Patrick:That's incredible, man. This has been this has been an amazing podcast and I appreciate your time coming on. I don't want to abuse it. So I do want to start to wrap it up, man, but I feel like we cover a lot of ground. We talked about metrics that matter. We talked about, you know, using different sorts of technology and just balancing things for the athletes for the long term. And And really a lot of it comes back to simple stuff of just, you know, managing your recovery and having appropriate, you know, dose response relationships in terms of the, the amount of work that we're asking out of these athletes. But with that in mind, man, you got a super busy schedule. You got a lot on your plate. What does your training currently look like?
Spencer Medick:I mean, you, you work with me a couple of years ago in season, and you kind of know how that life is, you know, week at home where we have access to a gym and we get after it and then a week on the road where maybe it's, you know, gym access once or twice a week and really hotel gym workout. So that's kind of what I'm transitioning to got after it a ton in in spring training, just because every day it was the same schedule. So we were able to get after it 7 days a week. I was training with James Surby, one of your guests who used to train me. During my pro career, we had a group of four of us total following the same program and getting after it. James, unfortunately popped his Achilles. So he, he was down for the count, so we had a little transition, but getting into a little bit of Pat Davidson's athletic weapon. I think there's a good amount of cardio built in there which is something I want to kind of start incorporating back into into my training this summer, especially take advantage of being outside almost every day in the summer. Probably hitting the weights three, four times a week might circle back and run hybrid back as well. Program I've, I've done and honestly looked very similar to training from when I was playing, but I don't think I've ever stopped training similar to how I did when I played It's just, it became a habit for me and I enjoy it. And I just feel better when I, you know, get a solid 60 minute workout in. So that's, that's mostly what I'm trying to do, but yeah, pretty packed schedules. We got opening night at home tonight, a brand new stadium. Our, our ownership put in a good amount of money in the new facilities and they look sweet. So, excited to play some home games finish it up. 10 day road trip to start the year. So good to be home. We got a nice little two week home stretch to kind of settle in a little bit, but yeah, craziness begins.
Ryan Patrick:All right, man. What's what's next for Spencer?
Spencer Medick:Not sure. You know, I love being with the Yankees, to be honest. I think the amount of information I learned from them year after year pays for itself really. And you know, when, when the Yankees call and offer you a job, you can't, you can't say no. So I, I love it here. I think we have an outstanding group of coaches that we just bounce ideas off each other all the time. Learn a ton. So, yeah, we'll kind of see where this goes. This year leads I'm on a contract here. So, we go from there most guys are, are kind of year by year contract year in the baseball world. But really just kind of focused on this year right now and doing what I can for the pitchers we have and hopefully help. A majority of them get to the big leagues. It's not always a reality, but that's the goal, right?
Ryan Patrick:It's the goal. Well, man, I appreciate your time. I appreciate the Yankees allowing you to do this. And you know, where, where can we find out more about you online? How can we follow you?
Spencer Medick:I, so I have social media, but I don't think I've posted on Instagram and close to three years and Twitter probably. Same so, yeah, not a huge social presence, but if people want to get in contact, I'll check them occasionally. So, yeah, if you want to try to shoot me a DM or connect on there I have social media, but I am, I am not a user of it. That's all right, man.
Ryan Patrick:You're the, you're the guy behind the guy. You have a tremendous amount of knowledge and that's, that's, I don't think you need a social presence to, to establish the authority and expertise that you have. So, man, I just. Can't say enough about what you brought to the table today. And I appreciate it so, so much.
Spencer Medick:Yeah. I appreciate you having me on this. This was a blast. I had a lot of fun, so appreciate it.
Ryan Patrick:Yeah, man. Well, make sure we stay connected through, through social texts, whatever it needs to, man, I don't want to lose touch, but appreciate your time. And I think that's, I should do it for us today.
Spencer Medick:Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we'll, we'll definitely stay in touch.